Hey guys, a few notes: 1. For the stock meat, again, definitely don't toss it. An obvious choice for the beef shin would be to cool it down and dry it out, then thinly slice it. You can take a look at how to do this inside of our ‘how to Danshan-ify everything’ chinesecookingdemystified.substack.com/i/142928031/beef-slices-and-dip-卤牛肉油辣子蘸水 Unlike the linked recipe, the shin will obviously lose a good bit more flavor over the course of 4-5 hours… but it’ll still be delicious devoured with chili oil. 2. Another thing you can do with the stock meat is what we showed in the video: a Yunnan-inspired ‘beef soup pot’. Thinly slice the beef and make the oil-based Danshan dip (ala the linked recipe above). Then make a pot with one part stock and three parts water - boil this with tomato, scallion or green garlic, ginger, and celery, and season with salt and MSG. Eat everything as a hotpot. Mint is one go-to vegetable for this sort of pot. 3. A more direct application, however, would be something like Hunan’s Chaigurou Hebaodan (拆骨肉荷包蛋), ala this video: th-cam.com/video/-GjCfgFeV3I/w-d-xo.html At the same time... I mean, it’s meat. You’ll find a way to use it. You can literally just take the stuff and dip it in a nice soy sauce as a snack. Or you could toss it as a random noodle soup topping. Freezes well - just portion it out (and you could toss it in noodle soups directly, no need to thaw). 4. According to Chefu, Pixian Doubanjiang was added to Mapo Tofu in the mid 20th century. I was surprised to not see it in the footage from the 80s, but it's possible it was there and we just didn't see it! 5. The progenitor of Mapo Tofu was likely Sichuan’s red braised tofu (红烧豆腐)... a rustic/home kitchen way of stewing tofu in Sichuan. Over the years, Chen Mapo’s tofu became basically synonymous with the dish and that morphed into its own thing. 6. The "Chen" in "Chen Mapo" actually wasn't Mapo's name, but referred to the family name of her husband, Chen Senfu. In the olden times in China, after women got married they would lose their name, simply be referred to as "[husband's family name] ___" (an odd convention that sounds downright alien to many people in modern China today!). As such, Mapo's real name has unfortunately been lost to history. 7. The stock in the 58’s recipe is “浓汤”, which means thick or concentrated. Looking at the ingredients it uses, i.e. pig trotter and ox tail - the final stock itself is probably pretty thick because of all the gelatin coming from trotter and tail. And that thickness probably makes up some of that thickness of the final sauce in the dish. 8. The soy sauce in the 58’s recipe is actually Sichuan’s special button mushroom soy sauce, it’s soy sauce fermented with mushroom and supposed to be very umami. Note that it’s different from the “mushroom soy sauce” you get at Asian grocer nowadays, which is just a dark soy sauce. So here in the video we used regular soy sauce for easier replication. 9. The Sichuan peppercorn quantity is ultimately up to you. But in Chengdu people generally go quite heavy on that. So don’t be afraid if you want the full experience. 10. Li Jieren talked about why Mapo’s version is better - vegetable oil can provide richness in the dish but it won’t cling onto the tofu when it cools down. Because back in the day, when people want to “treat yo self” they tend to opt for animal fat, lard being the common choice. And using caiziyou rapeseed oil, Mapo’s version delivers a similar sensation of “treat yo self” but minimize that unpleasant oiliness of using lard. 11. The original Chen Mapo’s location being close to the oil pressing workshops, it’s believed to be a main reason why Mapo’s tofu uses caiziyou rapeseed oil because of the easy accessibility. 12. Fanpu (rice shop) is the cheaper type of eatery that serves working class. The fancier type of restaurant at the in Sichuan is called Xiguan (banquet house, 席馆). Contrary of fanpu, xiguan provides all the ingredients, make the dishes, and even has alcohol to go along the meal. It’s the kind of place rich people would go and order one to multiple tables of delicate dishes to host guests. 13. The regulation of cow slaughtering we showed in the video was from the Great Qing Legal Code. The specific chapter about cattle is here if you’re curious: ctext.org/wiki.pl?if=gb&chapter=123609 By the way, that series 中国の食文化 is available on TH-cam. No English, but Japanese audio with Chinese subtitles (so if you know either language, you're in for a treat): Beijing: th-cam.com/video/__E7c4P7Rqs/w-d-xo.html Jiangnan (Lower Yangtze River): th-cam.com/video/3vod80G_k4o/w-d-xo.html Cantonese: th-cam.com/video/Afq8vknlYCk/w-d-xo.html Sichuan: th-cam.com/video/dCTjdCZBq5M/w-d-xo.html General: th-cam.com/video/tLlIb0TUEIw/w-d-xo.html
Dude, "stock" is made with bones, not meat. If you're making stock, the meat is already gone already, and you're just simmering the bones and aromatics to get the flavor and body/gelatin/collagen out... Whatever "meat" is left (stuck to the bones) is going to be mushy and gross and not worth saving... "Broth", on the other hand, is something completely different. If you are simmering meat and planning on eating it later, you are making broth, not stock. Just saying.
0:51 this is NOT typical japanese mapo tofu. never seen in my life. someone put noodle into mapo tofu and took picture and uploaded to the internet. are you obligated to insult chinese chef in japan anytime you mention Japan?🤨
Having been in the US Navy for a few decades, and being a child of a Navy family with a grandfather who was an Army Cook/Navy Diver who lived in interesting times taught me.... Every port I've been to there has been a Chinese Restaurant, and typically they do not have access to the whole 'grocery store' of typical foodstuffs they would find back home, so they adapt. The same is true over time, some ingredients become unavailable. So the temporal displacement of some ingredients or additions of new ones, to me, is normal. The Mapo Tofu of the 19th Century, '20s, '50s and today are all Mapo Tofu. Well, maybe not that Americanized nightmare version.... I also recognize that Mapo Tofu, as we say back home, is Po'folks food. Its minimal with inexpensive ingredients, but still yummy and stomach filling with some rice or noodles, but even by itself? A good bowl of Mapo Tofu on a cold night is just want you need to warm up with. ....and now I'm hungry. Dang it!
@@giuseppelogiurato5718 We choose to translate the term "浓汤" as "stock" here due to how the ingredient is employed - i.e. as a component in a larger dish. My association with the English term "broth" is that it tends to be something served as a soup. You can certainly disagree with our translation! These things are never completely cut and dry :)
@@newchannel1220 This is Mabo Tofu Ramen, and it's definitely a thing :) Quite tasty actually: th-cam.com/video/d8GLLbS0c3I/w-d-xo.htmlsi=As4iUeMUUE1r2sxK&t=148 The specific picture is one I took from a Ramen chain in Bangkok that I quite like that's popular with the Japanese expatriate community here. I felt that Mabo Tofu Ramen would communicate "Japanese Mapo Tofu" clearer than a standard bowl in Japan, visually.
*Exemplary research and well-presented as always.* Thank you for the deep dives into the evolution and history of Chinese cuisines, dishes, and ingredients-at all, along with recipes and how-to's, and in _English_ . It's so refreshing to be able to learn about one of the oldest cuisines in the world. Much appreciated.
You got me so hooked on first chinese cooking, and then culture, that I started learning Mandarin Chinese last year, and having the time of my life. Really appreciate your work and passion! Love, from Hungary
2:00 My mother was in college at this time (at 北大) and on the side she worked at a restaurant trying to sell cookbooks to Japanese tourists; this explains some things.
i feel that this video is a good place to leave this commend - i stumbled across your channel who knows how many years ago now, and it started my process of falling in love with chinese culture, cuisine, and language. before this, i'd been raised in an environment that saw casual racism and distrust of china (especially in the food) natural, and i feel incredibly fortunate to have had my eyes opened first by you and now by so many amazing creators. i now dream of learning mandarin and traveling to (or even living in) china, and experiencing some of these wonderful foods for myself. in the meantime, i've had to content myself with the sorts of dishes that can be made on an induction stove (broke college living doesn't quite facilitate a wok burner in the great united states) and this video reminded me of why i fell in love with it all in the first place. thank you so much for all that you do and all that you share, you've irrevocably changed my life and my view of the world for the better. also, i might have to find someone with a wok burner now - that 50s dish looks amazing...
Thanks for this great video! Been obsessed with your video's for a couple of years now. Even tried to learn a bit of mandarin because of them (more credit for that goes to Wang Gang, another hero). Unfortunately i'm only able to support with a symbolic $1 / month on patreon, but imo that's a dollar WELL spent. Would love to see more of these slightly longer form deep dives, in any case, keep up the good work. Good luck with the move and all and best wishes for the new year from the Netherlands! Oh, and i'm SO gonna make this today!
Omg, thank you for the all the hard work and dedication put into this. Your videos go above and beyond. Love the recipes presented here and I'm absolutely going to try these variations, building up to the 58 version.
This was fascinating! I love mapo tofu and this was such a great look at its history. Now I've got to track down that documentary! To your point about modernization being the biggest negative pressure on food culture, I think you're right - my particular interest is Ashkenazi (eastern European Jewish) cuisine, which is simultaneously a cuisine we (Ashkenazi Jews ourselves) care deeply about and also a cuisine that fairly enough gets a pretty bad rap for being bland and boring if it exists at all. But my research (Hasia Diner, Darra Goldstein, Gil Marks, among others) has shown me in no uncertain terms that the single to biggest factors in making Ashkenazi foodways, well, worse were 1) the Holocaust and 2) early to midcentury American cooking and the industrialization of food. When millions of lives worth of traditional knowledge is destroyed, and the single largest remaining diaspora group is in the US where (at the time) the general populace are focused on things like mixing two canned soups together and crisco, and you don't have access to a lot of traditional ingredients, well... You get a substantially impoverished cuisine. Anyway, that's far afield from mapo tofu, but you really made me think! And that's what I love this channel for, beyond the delicious recipes :)
I've used your original recipe for mapo tofu and have cooked the dish many times. I watch hundreds of cooking TH-cam videos but rarely follow the recipes and make them myself. Very interesting to learn more about a dish that I'm very fond of. Great work guys 👍
Mapo tofu was always one of my favorite dishes growing up, but I never questioned its history. This was a fantastic video, thanks for often covering these niche Chinese food topics. I feel like I owe the Japanese an apology for complaining about the pork, but I still don't like sweet mabo tofu. I am surprised about the 1958 version tasting less good after cooling down. I find that most modern mapo tofu from Sichuan restaurants tend to get richer in flavor overnight.
Thank you so much! This is my favorite dish and the history behind it is fascinating. I’ve been following this channel for forever and it never disappoints.
I think Mapo Tofu is my favorite dish to try whenever I see it on a menu. I absolutely adore all the different variations. I imagine you could eat mapo for a 100 days and have 100 different dishes. How beautiful a culinary gradient that would be.
The beans on toast jab hurt, as a man who grew up in Britain, but the stressor for terrible food was everyone forgetting how to cook during/post war. Traditional British food in the hands of a good cook is incredible, it just seems that 90 percent of people born from 1940 onwards can't cook. The best meals I had growing up outside of family (Austrian descent) were from people with at least 1 continental european parent. Remembering the food of fully British people makes me shudder - though maybe that is just London/Essex...
Yeah the wars, on top of the stress our food had already had from industrialisation, absolute killer. I'm glad we've managed to get some of it back as there's no reason our food shouldn't be as respected as anything from Italy or China or anywhere. We just have to finish digging ourselves out of the Dino nuggets phase...
Tins of beans in tomato sauce was definitely a capitalist success, though. They make for a delicious quick meal, but they obliterated the home cooking of beans in sauces, and thus any recipe that involved that. Without Heinz Baked Beans, we'd probably have the variety of bean/pulse dishes France has.
The worst food experience I had was in Cuba during vacation. Yet, I had delicious Cuban food in Toronto. Good food often relies on the ingredients on hand, and neither Cuba today nor the rationed days of UK allowed for that.
@@beansprugget2505depends on what you think is "traditional". Rationing during WW2 obliterated British cuisine, and when you look at e.g. 19th century British cookbooks, they are very different from modern British cuisine (and the use of spices is very different and much more liberal). Probably a very traditional dish that is still around would be a roast, but even that has changed a lot over the last 100-200 years in terms of cooking techniques, seasoning and trimmings/side dishes.
Absolutely killer video! I have made mapo tofu using your CIA video's recipe a half dozen times now and every time it's turned out great! I even did a version using a fried duxelles for my vegan friend and even that was good. I feel like the biggest takeaway for the "authentic" discussion at the end is that recipes get codified because they taste good and people want to recreate them. I like making the recipes from your channel specifically because I have never had a lot of this food and I can't get it around here. So I like knowing that your recipes are very likely to be "this is what people in China expect this food to taste like". I don't care about "authentic" as much as "IDK what this is supposed to taste like so I need a frame of reference". So thank you all very much for your hard work! I'm extremely grateful for you as a resource!
The Chinese government getting the Japanese to write a food documentary is wild! Thanks for all the work you do, I'm definitely gonna try out the recipe
Why would that be wild? Despite all the issues between the country both countries are fascinated about each other and most foreign visitors in Japan are mainland Chinese.
It was a Japanese-language documentary so one'd assume it's aimed primarily at the JP audience, probably to spread Chinese culture abroad etc. And amongst all elements that constitute a culture, food is probably the easiest for foreigners to accept cuz it's probably the least politicised.
@@marshallzzz It's true, we love Chinese food. In America, when you say "Chinese food" you think of cheap food, takeout food, etc. In Japan when you say "I'm going to eat Chinese food" people think of a fancy sitdown place, a once in a while meal, or you take your business clients there, like a steakhouse for Westerners.
This video is a prime example of why I loathe people who gate keep food under the pretense of authencity. I’m Chinese and Chinese people are especially guilty of this. Like when is the cut off for authenticity? Do you want to eat they ate back in the 1200s? So much of what we eat today is nothing like what it was before, be it through cultural exchange or whatever. If it’s good, eat it.
Yeah I'm often of a similar mindset, but at the same time, there certainly *are* a bunch of bullshit recipes floating around out there. To me, there's a mid-point here. Vaguely relevant CJ the X: th-cam.com/video/dMpJFbwR8OM/w-d-xo.htmlsi=T8SManLEKzEIIPKf&t=2100
Wow this was so fun! Been perfecting my ma po tofu for a while. It’s really pretty easy & got it where we all really like it, even my own kids make it on their own & they all have pepper grinders thanks to last Christmas. But now I’m intrigued to try other styles. No bean paste? Interesting…. Green garlic? More interesting….
Popping in and finding this video within minutes of it going live is kismet. This is my favorite dish of all time, with my favorite favorite being from Chengdu Impression in Chicago, and can't wait to learn all about it.
This is by far the best episode of your channel! Just great (even although I still not sharing your use of MSG…). I wish you all the best for your move.
Thanks for another great video. I love mapo tofu and I almost never follow the official modern version. I almost always make it different every time based on what I feel like eating. When I was a kid, I loved mapo tofu and loved spice. My Taiwanese parents don't like spicy, but I like it on the hot side. Especially when we went to sichuan restaurants. To me the important thing is cooking with love and respect. Even today chefs are putting their own twist on mapo.
Yet another inspiring video. Query, what is the ratio of video to background field work? Recipe testing, researching, film editing, talking to sources, you get it. You two are very impressive and rather daunting. Thank you.
Hmm... it's really kind of difficult to say. Because like, for us the 'background work' is just sort of our... life :) If we didn't have the channel, we would still read the stuff we're interested in (food/history/etc), travel where we're curious about, cook because we enjoy cooking. The channel helps structure that all a bit, but it's all so ever-present that I don't consider it 'work' at all? (writing, meanwhile, feels like work, but it's fun work; filming and editing videos is proper work-work but it's not that bad in the grand scheme of things)
IT's a complete mystery to me why you don't have a lot more viewers and Josh is sitting around ranking American fast food these days, not cooking, and sitting at millions of viewers.
Thanks for the video, outstanding and fascinating as always. Good luck on the move! We're going through one too, and they're always an...event. Harrowing, even. So we hope yours goes well :)
21:50 I ran into this just last week! I made some mapo tofu and it was pretty incredible, and had plenty of leftovers that I ate throughout the week and while it was still delicious, it definitely was missing something compared to fresh
So interesting! I don’t think I’m going to give up douban jiang as I love the flavor. But I would emphasize that it’s better to wait and add the tofu relatively late, so it preserves some of its color. With silken tofu it doesn’t take any time at all to absorb the flavor. And eat it right away! Don’t let it sit around.
The recipe of adding fermented black beans and chili peppers is very common in Hunan cuisine. If Sichuan peppercorns are not added, this recipe is very similar to Hunan cuisine. Considering that Huguang is filling Sichuan, this is very likely.
What got me into Chinese cooking was the anime Cooking Master Boy (1997) and the recipe of the first episodes: mapo tofu. I was especially confused since I saw the mapo tofu as we know it from the 1956 recipe, while the traditional family recipe was closer to the first recipe of the video: pork pieces, very clear sauce from the lack of dobanjiang, and a single chili. It is now that I realize that the anime was most likely anachronistic, but I pretty much cook mapo tofu twice a month as a result of that.
Back in college I worked at a Chinese restaurant. The couple that owned it had gone through the "great leap forward". They had both been college students that were sent out to the rural countryside to be farmers. We had some wild conversations- their stories were even crazier than I'd read in western recordings of Mao's works. They also made some of the best Mapo Dofu I've ever had. Good times with VERY good people. They treated the whole staff like family. Also, it's sort of weird that the recipe calls for beef. Both of the owners of the restaurant I worked at, as well as a contemporary friend who grew up in the mid-north of mainland China back in the 80s never had beef (at least that they could remember). It was always lamb/chicken/pork or fish if they lived near a river/lake.
I suppose I should be surprised that the more modern recipe that I have been using has a lot more ingredients, as this dish did originate as a simple working class meal. That said, I was shocked that the older recipes had fermented black beans and no pixian doubanjiang. That seems to potentially really make this a different dish. I'll have to give a try and see how different it is; perhaps I'll have two recipes I can use depending on my mood! I will say that my understanding of the way the beef is used, i.e., cooked until crunchy, makes it more a texture element and I have made a vegetarian version with chopped and then fried wood ear mushroom instead of beef. Great video and safe travels!
Hey guys (and other culinarily inclined viewers!) I have the unenviable misfortune of having an allergy to soy protein; that means no tofu, soy beans, miso. Two weird exceptions are soy sauce and the Korean fermented soy paste (not really sure how that works...) I've always wanted to follow along with the recipes on this channel, but my allergies present a pretty serious obstacle. Is there anything I can use to substitute tofu? What about the fermented soy beans? Thanks so much, love this channel.
In this one case, I'd hazard a guess subbing out the tofu for a white fish might be pretty nice, or maybe sometime like the pomelo rind preparation they covered on the channel several years ago? There's also the chicken "tofu" recipe they covered in 2018. Have you previously tried the Chinese fermented soy beans? I'm wondering if there's something in the fermentation process of the Korean paste and the soy sauce that's denaturing the protein you're allergic to. Could this Korean paste be used in this dish (I'm unfamiliar with its flavor profile)?
Hmm... unfortunately we haven't covered peanut tofu yet (which was the first thing I thought of), but there's lots of 'tofus' in China :) While it probably wouldn't work directly here, rice tofu is a very nice product: th-cam.com/video/ssxwWvjUgKw/w-d-xo.html And of course, Cantonese 'fish tofu puffs' are one of my favorite things, period: th-cam.com/video/HrDMF8Co0d4/w-d-xo.html
so these are a few thoughts as a non-expert, late at night and off the top of my head, so take them with a hefty pinch of salt but: iirc, pixian doubanjiang is traditionally made with broad beans, not soy beans, so you might be ok with a more modern mapo recipe which uses that as the foundational flavour (idk what the reality of mass-produced doubanjiang is wrt to soy so you'd have to check the ingredients for individual brands) as for the tofu, maybe try experimenting with some of the starch-based jellies and "tofus" that come from the south-west of China and neighbouring regions. Chris and Steph did a video for a rice-based one from Guizhou a while back, and mung bean starch jelly is pretty widespread. I don't know how well they'd stand up to simmering in the sauce, but it feels like they could provide a similar soft/smooth/slippery/comparatively-bland contrast to the strongly flavoured sauce
ayyy, fellow soy allergy survivor! hello! (soy sauce and fermented soy paste makes me suffer though, you're lucky on that part. the fermentation probably has something to do with it bcs fish gives me trouble but fish sauce doesn't. something something the protein gets denatured or something) i've found that steamed egg has a very similar texture to silken tofu, and it having very mild taste by itself should also mimic how tofu generally works. mix egg and water in a bowl, strain if you want it to be as smooth as possible, then cover with cling wrap and steam. most recommend to eat it with soy sauce, sesame oil, and chopped green onions, but it should also be good as tofu replacement in mapo tofu.
This will take a lot of work and medical intervention. It depends on how severe your allergies are, - talking as a registered nurse here. If the allergy affects your airways definitely avoid them. However if your allergies are like skin symptoms you can definitely not go wrong with prophylactic anti histamine meds before eating. But for a long term approach we actually advice parents of allergic kids to a desensitization regimen. like introducing the allergen little by little over a large period of time. until the allergic reactions become more manageable
Fascinating enough, the original is exactly how my mom has always made it. Chili oil, garlic, tofu, pork, and scallions. Perhaps that's the version that made it to where she grew up.
So from where I read elsewhere: (dont quote this from me) that the inland Province of Sichuan lacked table salt and thus had to import salt from other places of China. There were a lot of oxen and cows being used as beast of burdens to transport carts of salt in and out of Sichuan in the old days. The lower class labourers sometimes could get their hands on beef of the oxen that died to fatigue in the transportation business.
That's interesting! The use of beef in this dish has always thrown me. My mom is from Taiwan and beef is a relatively recent addition to their diet. Cattle were draft animals, not meat animals. Pork was much more common.
Look at Pasta Grammar about recipe shift on Bolognese sauce and how it has shifted. Chinese culture/coking is not the only one affected by regional😊 variations and ingredient availability “drift”.Language “drift” also occurs. Southern English is much closer to the dialect used in the southern USA & Appalachia, (for instance)
the '58 reminds me of the mapo at Chiko in Greenpoint (Brooklyn), one of the beefiest things I've ever eaten. if you'll be in NYC at all and get a chance, definitely recommend it!
I feel vindicated by this video for adding beef/tofu closer (but not quite) 1 to 2 proportion. Though I don't know if I can make myself not to add pixian... it's my favourite part of the process.
Thanks a lot. I will definitely try the 50s version. Had Mapo Dofu in Chengdu and it is one of my favourite dishes but I did it wrong using Doubanjiang (at least I did the beef part right). Tomorrow I will go and purchase fermented black beans. Over the time people go and bring their personal touch into recipes. Look what they have done to the humble Carbonara but at least true Italians are culinary traditionalists, easy to tell right from wrong.
Not gonna lie, the '58 recipe looks amazing as you say, but the 19th century recipe looks like something I'd want to play around with. That sliced pork looks so good in there.
So what I did with it was marinate it with our 'standard marinade', and then cooked it over a low flame because I was deathly afraid that the chili powder would burn. I think perhaps using a product like duojiao or LGM's 'pickled chili' might be a reasonable direction to go with, actually? I also went very herb heavy with it, using similar ratios as the 'Horse Station Pot' that Dawei shared a few years back :)
The Japanese take on Chinese food is also absolutely fascinating. I tend to make "Japanized" mapo tofu for my family since it's less spicy and easier for my kids to handle. The flavors are more rounded and less bold. Still a very nice textural contrast between the ground meat and the soft tofu.
A lid made with sticks woven together with some cotton string made specifically to use on the wok is a godsend (and also is easy to make) I think people who know how to cook judge other people's cooking online by how many shortcuts they take, like, if i see mexican-americans making some dish using canned stuff i would squint a bit more than if they dont simmer enough a sauce made from scratch; with chinese cuisine i had a more open mind regarding apparently counterintutive or "odd" stuff because i understand that their aim (as in expected flavor/seasoning/ is diferent than ours and would be more willing to try a, say, 5 year old fermented bread sauce than those casserole looking enchiladas made with canned sauce.
In the US my preference for meat is to buy the "assorted" pork cuts, thin cut. They usually end up on sale, I just roughly cut the meat off the bones, save the bones for stock, and use the meat however you like. Thin sliced does wonders for the texture compared to the thicker cuts that americans are used to.
I made mabo dofu for a date once, who commented that it wasn’t “authentic” mabo dofu because I used pork instead of beef and it wasn’t spicy. It was my Japanese grandmother’s recipe for mabo dofu, which she never made with beef because we didn’t eat beef. My date wasn’t even Chinese!
@ yeah, especially since I never claimed I was making some sort of genuine, traditional recipe. I simply said it was one of my favorite dishes that I wanted her to try.
Wow! This seems so similar to the version I make and learned from Fuchsia Dunlop’s Land of Plenty, of course with the exception that I believe it’s minced pork, and also doubanjiang is included. But otherwise, I feel like I can already taste how delicious this is in my mind. I am DEFINITELY going to make this version when I can get my hands on some stock ingredients.
This was awesome but I do have one question- how did doubanjiang go from being not part of the standard recipe for over 100 years to being considered necessary?
That, I think, is an interesting riddle! All we have is Chefu saying that it was added in the mid 20th century. As to when exactly and why, that's either lost to history or there for a historian to uncover...
@@IAmTheUltimateRuler Or perhaps it has something to do with the increased availability of Pixian douban? In the past it was very much a Pixian special, before it was industrialized Always hard to guess these sorts of things.
Super cool video, really interesting and amazing research as always! Could you expand a bit on why the '58 version gets worse as it sits? (in the spirit of "it's bad for specific reasons") With more standard Mapo Tofu, I have often found it's really good the next day - maybe not better but different? The tofu soaks through, so a bit more homogenised, but definitely tasty!
I just made a big batch of Mapo Tofu the other night; I was craving it like a fiend... So nice on a cold winter morning! Is it considered a "winter dish" in China?
Thanks for another informative video! I always wonder about the use of beef in mapo tofu. My Taiwanese mom always adapted her cooking to available ingredients in US so any kind of dish that called for ground pork, usually ended up with ground beef. My understanding is that beef wasn't really eaten much in Taiwan as well as in the broader Chinese culture as cattle were working animals needed to pull the plow on the farm. Pigs were raised for food so pork was the most common meat. Even now some elderly Taiwanese folks avoid eating beef out of respect for the labor of oxen. So I'm extremely curious how a working class dish from Sichuan ended up having beef in it!
My biggest gripe with Americanized Chinese food in the States is mapo tofu doesn't have any meat in it. I've never seen it and it always tastes sweet like they intentionally add too much sugar to it. It drives me insane
I was surprised with the price for oxtails!! Here in Brazil it still is one of the cheapest cuts of beef, it's even cheaper than most other bone-in cuts like beef ribs and transversally-cut shanks.
Please can you you make a video about your kitchen design. Is a steel backsplash common in Chinese kitchens? Do you prefer to cook under the range hood inside or cooking out in the balcony? Is a dishwasher common? Do you have a freezer unit for storing meat?
Hey guys, a few notes:
1. For the stock meat, again, definitely don't toss it. An obvious choice for the beef shin would be to cool it down and dry it out, then thinly slice it. You can take a look at how to do this inside of our ‘how to Danshan-ify everything’ chinesecookingdemystified.substack.com/i/142928031/beef-slices-and-dip-卤牛肉油辣子蘸水 Unlike the linked recipe, the shin will obviously lose a good bit more flavor over the course of 4-5 hours… but it’ll still be delicious devoured with chili oil.
2. Another thing you can do with the stock meat is what we showed in the video: a Yunnan-inspired ‘beef soup pot’. Thinly slice the beef and make the oil-based Danshan dip (ala the linked recipe above). Then make a pot with one part stock and three parts water - boil this with tomato, scallion or green garlic, ginger, and celery, and season with salt and MSG. Eat everything as a hotpot. Mint is one go-to vegetable for this sort of pot.
3. A more direct application, however, would be something like Hunan’s Chaigurou Hebaodan (拆骨肉荷包蛋), ala this video: th-cam.com/video/-GjCfgFeV3I/w-d-xo.html At the same time... I mean, it’s meat. You’ll find a way to use it. You can literally just take the stuff and dip it in a nice soy sauce as a snack. Or you could toss it as a random noodle soup topping. Freezes well - just portion it out (and you could toss it in noodle soups directly, no need to thaw).
4. According to Chefu, Pixian Doubanjiang was added to Mapo Tofu in the mid 20th century. I was surprised to not see it in the footage from the 80s, but it's possible it was there and we just didn't see it!
5. The progenitor of Mapo Tofu was likely Sichuan’s red braised tofu (红烧豆腐)... a rustic/home kitchen way of stewing tofu in Sichuan. Over the years, Chen Mapo’s tofu became basically synonymous with the dish and that morphed into its own thing.
6. The "Chen" in "Chen Mapo" actually wasn't Mapo's name, but referred to the family name of her husband, Chen Senfu. In the olden times in China, after women got married they would lose their name, simply be referred to as "[husband's family name] ___" (an odd convention that sounds downright alien to many people in modern China today!). As such, Mapo's real name has unfortunately been lost to history.
7. The stock in the 58’s recipe is “浓汤”, which means thick or concentrated. Looking at the ingredients it uses, i.e. pig trotter and ox tail - the final stock itself is probably pretty thick because of all the gelatin coming from trotter and tail. And that thickness probably makes up some of that thickness of the final sauce in the dish.
8. The soy sauce in the 58’s recipe is actually Sichuan’s special button mushroom soy sauce, it’s soy sauce fermented with mushroom and supposed to be very umami. Note that it’s different from the “mushroom soy sauce” you get at Asian grocer nowadays, which is just a dark soy sauce. So here in the video we used regular soy sauce for easier replication.
9. The Sichuan peppercorn quantity is ultimately up to you. But in Chengdu people generally go quite heavy on that. So don’t be afraid if you want the full experience.
10. Li Jieren talked about why Mapo’s version is better - vegetable oil can provide richness in the dish but it won’t cling onto the tofu when it cools down. Because back in the day, when people want to “treat yo self” they tend to opt for animal fat, lard being the common choice. And using caiziyou rapeseed oil, Mapo’s version delivers a similar sensation of “treat yo self” but minimize that unpleasant oiliness of using lard.
11. The original Chen Mapo’s location being close to the oil pressing workshops, it’s believed to be a main reason why Mapo’s tofu uses caiziyou rapeseed oil because of the easy accessibility.
12. Fanpu (rice shop) is the cheaper type of eatery that serves working class. The fancier type of restaurant at the in Sichuan is called Xiguan (banquet house, 席馆). Contrary of fanpu, xiguan provides all the ingredients, make the dishes, and even has alcohol to go along the meal. It’s the kind of place rich people would go and order one to multiple tables of delicate dishes to host guests.
13. The regulation of cow slaughtering we showed in the video was from the Great Qing Legal Code. The specific chapter about cattle is here if you’re curious: ctext.org/wiki.pl?if=gb&chapter=123609
By the way, that series 中国の食文化 is available on TH-cam. No English, but Japanese audio with Chinese subtitles (so if you know either language, you're in for a treat):
Beijing: th-cam.com/video/__E7c4P7Rqs/w-d-xo.html
Jiangnan (Lower Yangtze River): th-cam.com/video/3vod80G_k4o/w-d-xo.html
Cantonese: th-cam.com/video/Afq8vknlYCk/w-d-xo.html
Sichuan: th-cam.com/video/dCTjdCZBq5M/w-d-xo.html
General: th-cam.com/video/tLlIb0TUEIw/w-d-xo.html
Dude, "stock" is made with bones, not meat. If you're making stock, the meat is already gone already, and you're just simmering the bones and aromatics to get the flavor and body/gelatin/collagen out... Whatever "meat" is left (stuck to the bones) is going to be mushy and gross and not worth saving... "Broth", on the other hand, is something completely different. If you are simmering meat and planning on eating it later, you are making broth, not stock. Just saying.
0:51 this is NOT typical japanese mapo tofu. never seen in my life.
someone put noodle into mapo tofu and took picture and uploaded to the internet.
are you obligated to insult chinese chef in japan anytime you mention Japan?🤨
Having been in the US Navy for a few decades, and being a child of a Navy family with a grandfather who was an Army Cook/Navy Diver who lived in interesting times taught me.... Every port I've been to there has been a Chinese Restaurant, and typically they do not have access to the whole 'grocery store' of typical foodstuffs they would find back home, so they adapt. The same is true over time, some ingredients become unavailable. So the temporal displacement of some ingredients or additions of new ones, to me, is normal. The Mapo Tofu of the 19th Century, '20s, '50s and today are all Mapo Tofu. Well, maybe not that Americanized nightmare version.... I also recognize that Mapo Tofu, as we say back home, is Po'folks food. Its minimal with inexpensive ingredients, but still yummy and stomach filling with some rice or noodles, but even by itself? A good bowl of Mapo Tofu on a cold night is just want you need to warm up with. ....and now I'm hungry. Dang it!
@@giuseppelogiurato5718 We choose to translate the term "浓汤" as "stock" here due to how the ingredient is employed - i.e. as a component in a larger dish. My association with the English term "broth" is that it tends to be something served as a soup.
You can certainly disagree with our translation! These things are never completely cut and dry :)
@@newchannel1220 This is Mabo Tofu Ramen, and it's definitely a thing :) Quite tasty actually: th-cam.com/video/d8GLLbS0c3I/w-d-xo.htmlsi=As4iUeMUUE1r2sxK&t=148
The specific picture is one I took from a Ramen chain in Bangkok that I quite like that's popular with the Japanese expatriate community here. I felt that Mabo Tofu Ramen would communicate "Japanese Mapo Tofu" clearer than a standard bowl in Japan, visually.
*Exemplary research and well-presented as always.* Thank you for the deep dives into the evolution and history of Chinese cuisines, dishes, and ingredients-at all, along with recipes and how-to's, and in _English_ . It's so refreshing to be able to learn about one of the oldest cuisines in the world. Much appreciated.
You got me so hooked on first chinese cooking, and then culture, that I started learning Mandarin Chinese last year, and having the time of my life. Really appreciate your work and passion! Love, from Hungary
欢迎有空来玩！
有没有了解匈奴（the hun)的历史，这可是老对手了。🙃比蒙古还古老。
Impressive! Where/how are you learning mandarin?
2:00 My mother was in college at this time (at 北大) and on the side she worked at a restaurant trying to sell cookbooks to Japanese tourists; this explains some things.
Made the '58 version today. Masterpiece indeed ❤
Few people could make a mystery about the origins of mapo tofu into a fascinating video. Congratulatons!
@@sethjchandler nothing mysterious about mabo dofu.
It is glorious.
i feel that this video is a good place to leave this commend - i stumbled across your channel who knows how many years ago now, and it started my process of falling in love with chinese culture, cuisine, and language. before this, i'd been raised in an environment that saw casual racism and distrust of china (especially in the food) natural, and i feel incredibly fortunate to have had my eyes opened first by you and now by so many amazing creators. i now dream of learning mandarin and traveling to (or even living in) china, and experiencing some of these wonderful foods for myself. in the meantime, i've had to content myself with the sorts of dishes that can be made on an induction stove (broke college living doesn't quite facilitate a wok burner in the great united states) and this video reminded me of why i fell in love with it all in the first place. thank you so much for all that you do and all that you share, you've irrevocably changed my life and my view of the world for the better.
also, i might have to find someone with a wok burner now - that 50s dish looks amazing...
No worries on being away. Every video you guys put out is top quality, we can afford to wait for it
Best of luck on the move
Thanks for this great video! Been obsessed with your video's for a couple of years now. Even tried to learn a bit of mandarin because of them (more credit for that goes to Wang Gang, another hero). Unfortunately i'm only able to support with a symbolic $1 / month on patreon, but imo that's a dollar WELL spent. Would love to see more of these slightly longer form deep dives, in any case, keep up the good work. Good luck with the move and all and best wishes for the new year from the Netherlands!
Oh, and i'm SO gonna make this today!
the '58 version is def what i'm eating today :)
Many times a dollar is a lot of dollars
Omg, thank you for the all the hard work and dedication put into this. Your videos go above and beyond.
Love the recipes presented here and I'm absolutely going to try these variations, building up to the 58 version.
This was fascinating! I love mapo tofu and this was such a great look at its history. Now I've got to track down that documentary! To your point about modernization being the biggest negative pressure on food culture, I think you're right - my particular interest is Ashkenazi (eastern European Jewish) cuisine, which is simultaneously a cuisine we (Ashkenazi Jews ourselves) care deeply about and also a cuisine that fairly enough gets a pretty bad rap for being bland and boring if it exists at all. But my research (Hasia Diner, Darra Goldstein, Gil Marks, among others) has shown me in no uncertain terms that the single to biggest factors in making Ashkenazi foodways, well, worse were 1) the Holocaust and 2) early to midcentury American cooking and the industrialization of food. When millions of lives worth of traditional knowledge is destroyed, and the single largest remaining diaspora group is in the US where (at the time) the general populace are focused on things like mixing two canned soups together and crisco, and you don't have access to a lot of traditional ingredients, well... You get a substantially impoverished cuisine. Anyway, that's far afield from mapo tofu, but you really made me think! And that's what I love this channel for, beyond the delicious recipes :)
i love these videos so much. they're about food but they're really about so much more. I love your outlook & i love the way you teach
"If my calculations are correct, a bowl of mapo tofu will strike the Clock Tower at exactly 10:04pm."
_Dawn of The Final Day. 24 hours remaining_
I've used your original recipe for mapo tofu and have cooked the dish many times. I watch hundreds of cooking TH-cam videos but rarely follow the recipes and make them myself. Very interesting to learn more about a dish that I'm very fond of. Great work guys 👍
Mapo tofu was always one of my favorite dishes growing up, but I never questioned its history. This was a fantastic video, thanks for often covering these niche Chinese food topics. I feel like I owe the Japanese an apology for complaining about the pork, but I still don't like sweet mabo tofu.
I am surprised about the 1958 version tasting less good after cooling down. I find that most modern mapo tofu from Sichuan restaurants tend to get richer in flavor overnight.
THIS IS SO INTERESTING!!
I was just wondering about this topic, having recently seen Kenji's very different Japanese-American mapo tofu
Thank you so much! This is my favorite dish and the history behind it is fascinating. I’ve been following this channel for forever and it never disappoints.
So hungry now.
I love all kinds of good food.
Love your research! Thank you!
Love your channel, great insite and great taste!
谢谢
Xièxiè
✌😋👌💞
I think Mapo Tofu is my favorite dish to try whenever I see it on a menu. I absolutely adore all the different variations. I imagine you could eat mapo for a 100 days and have 100 different dishes. How beautiful a culinary gradient that would be.
The beans on toast jab hurt, as a man who grew up in Britain, but the stressor for terrible food was everyone forgetting how to cook during/post war. Traditional British food in the hands of a good cook is incredible, it just seems that 90 percent of people born from 1940 onwards can't cook. The best meals I had growing up outside of family (Austrian descent) were from people with at least 1 continental european parent. Remembering the food of fully British people makes me shudder - though maybe that is just London/Essex...
Yeah the wars, on top of the stress our food had already had from industrialisation, absolute killer. I'm glad we've managed to get some of it back as there's no reason our food shouldn't be as respected as anything from Italy or China or anywhere. We just have to finish digging ourselves out of the Dino nuggets phase...
Tins of beans in tomato sauce was definitely a capitalist success, though. They make for a delicious quick meal, but they obliterated the home cooking of beans in sauces, and thus any recipe that involved that. Without Heinz Baked Beans, we'd probably have the variety of bean/pulse dishes France has.
The worst food experience I had was in Cuba during vacation. Yet, I had delicious Cuban food in Toronto.
Good food often relies on the ingredients on hand, and neither Cuba today nor the rationed days of UK allowed for that.
What is an example of good traditional British food?
@@beansprugget2505depends on what you think is "traditional". Rationing during WW2 obliterated British cuisine, and when you look at e.g. 19th century British cookbooks, they are very different from modern British cuisine (and the use of spices is very different and much more liberal). Probably a very traditional dish that is still around would be a roast, but even that has changed a lot over the last 100-200 years in terms of cooking techniques, seasoning and trimmings/side dishes.
I consider myself to be prodoundly lucky your channel exists. Im also really enjoying these deep dives
The historical context and deep dive is such a treasure. Cooking alongside the quotes! Gold.
Absolutely killer video! I have made mapo tofu using your CIA video's recipe a half dozen times now and every time it's turned out great! I even did a version using a fried duxelles for my vegan friend and even that was good.
I feel like the biggest takeaway for the "authentic" discussion at the end is that recipes get codified because they taste good and people want to recreate them. I like making the recipes from your channel specifically because I have never had a lot of this food and I can't get it around here. So I like knowing that your recipes are very likely to be "this is what people in China expect this food to taste like". I don't care about "authentic" as much as "IDK what this is supposed to taste like so I need a frame of reference".
So thank you all very much for your hard work! I'm extremely grateful for you as a resource!
So glad you're back! I hope allnis well, thank you for another fascinating video! I really enjoy these history ones
Love your dedication to researching cuisine - kudos to you
The Chinese government getting the Japanese to write a food documentary is wild! Thanks for all the work you do, I'm definitely gonna try out the recipe
IIRC in the 80s Japan and China were in a cooperative mood.
The Japanese do really like Chinese food
Why would that be wild? Despite all the issues between the country both countries are fascinated about each other and most foreign visitors in Japan are mainland Chinese.
It was a Japanese-language documentary so one'd assume it's aimed primarily at the JP audience, probably to spread Chinese culture abroad etc. And amongst all elements that constitute a culture, food is probably the easiest for foreigners to accept cuz it's probably the least politicised.
@@marshallzzz It's true, we love Chinese food. In America, when you say "Chinese food" you think of cheap food, takeout food, etc. In Japan when you say "I'm going to eat Chinese food" people think of a fancy sitdown place, a once in a while meal, or you take your business clients there, like a steakhouse for Westerners.
This video is a prime example of why I loathe people who gate keep food under the pretense of authencity. I’m Chinese and Chinese people are especially guilty of this. Like when is the cut off for authenticity? Do you want to eat they ate back in the 1200s? So much of what we eat today is nothing like what it was before, be it through cultural exchange or whatever. If it’s good, eat it.
Yeah I'm often of a similar mindset, but at the same time, there certainly *are* a bunch of bullshit recipes floating around out there.
To me, there's a mid-point here. Vaguely relevant CJ the X: th-cam.com/video/dMpJFbwR8OM/w-d-xo.htmlsi=T8SManLEKzEIIPKf&t=2100
@@ChineseCookingDemystifieddidn’t expect to see CJ the X mentioned here, great to know my favourite creators watch my other favourite creators!
Uhh… since when do Chinese wear turbans. And are brown skinned?
He is the opposite of a gatekeeper. An excellent educator.
@@nottheoneyourelookingfor0504 he is probably from Xinjiang
Wow this was so fun! Been perfecting my ma po tofu for a while. It’s really pretty easy & got it where we all really like it, even my own kids make it on their own & they all have pepper grinders thanks to last Christmas. But now I’m intrigued to try other styles. No bean paste? Interesting…. Green garlic? More interesting….
Popping in and finding this video within minutes of it going live is kismet. This is my favorite dish of all time, with my favorite favorite being from Chengdu Impression in Chicago, and can't wait to learn all about it.
Yep. This was a banger.
Ha I love that place! The location next to me (chengdu aroma closed and or moved) but I’m glad it’s still around
This is by far the best episode of your channel! Just great (even although I still not sharing your use of MSG…). I wish you all the best for your move.
Another great video, Chris. And enjoy your time off.
Thanks for another great video. I love mapo tofu and I almost never follow the official modern version. I almost always make it different every time based on what I feel like eating. When I was a kid, I loved mapo tofu and loved spice. My Taiwanese parents don't like spicy, but I like it on the hot side. Especially when we went to sichuan restaurants.
To me the important thing is cooking with love and respect. Even today chefs are putting their own twist on mapo.
Loved this. This is one of my favorite dishes and I've always wondered about it's history
Awesome video! Love your dedication to that mystical dish! On a personal note, the best mapo tofu I made was with leftover pho broth. Soooo good!!
I love history of food vids, the origin and how it has progressed. What a great vid.
I love these longer context videos so much. Good luck on the move!
I'm loving the intonation in your newer videos John, so much more relaxed. I love your recipes and informative approach. Thank you
His name is Chris, just FYI.😉
always enjoy your illustrated segments in these videos
ty again
Thanks for this video! It's always fun to learn about the history of a dish you really enjoy, and I really enjoy this one.
Fantastic work - an interesting journey through time!
Yet another inspiring video. Query, what is the ratio of video to background field work? Recipe testing, researching, film editing, talking to sources, you get it. You two are very impressive and rather daunting. Thank you.
Hmm... it's really kind of difficult to say. Because like, for us the 'background work' is just sort of our... life :) If we didn't have the channel, we would still read the stuff we're interested in (food/history/etc), travel where we're curious about, cook because we enjoy cooking. The channel helps structure that all a bit, but it's all so ever-present that I don't consider it 'work' at all?
(writing, meanwhile, feels like work, but it's fun work; filming and editing videos is proper work-work but it's not that bad in the grand scheme of things)
Hope you guys hit 1 million this year, you deserve it!
IT's a complete mystery to me why you don't have a lot more viewers and Josh is sitting around ranking American fast food these days, not cooking, and sitting at millions of viewers.
He makes algorithmic content slop.
Josh?
@@patavinity1262Weissman.
You have a new fan, what an amazing video about essential Chinese dish!
Tonight, I made ma po tofu for dinner.
After dinner, I found that this had been posted!
Perfect timing!
The Back To The Future video clips are too funny. Nicely played you two.
Thanks for the video, outstanding and fascinating as always. Good luck on the move! We're going through one too, and they're always an...event. Harrowing, even. So we hope yours goes well :)
21:50 I ran into this just last week! I made some mapo tofu and it was pretty incredible, and had plenty of leftovers that I ate throughout the week and while it was still delicious, it definitely was missing something compared to fresh
"Hmmm, what should I watch this morning?"
*Sees new CCD video on Mapo Tofu*
*Windmill slams the play button*
you guys have become much better storytellers over the years
The illustrations are so cool!
I know, I love them. They’re very cute!
我爱您们的视频。谢谢。
Excited to try this. I’ve always found it really difficult to get enough pixiandoubanjiang flavor without ending up with way too much salt.
Saaame. I’m gonna try this, too, when I can afford the meat for the stock (even the cheaper options are hard for me because I’m low income.🥲)
So interesting! I don’t think I’m going to give up douban jiang as I love the flavor. But I would emphasize that it’s better to wait and add the tofu relatively late, so it preserves some of its color. With silken tofu it doesn’t take any time at all to absorb the flavor. And eat it right away! Don’t let it sit around.
The recipe of adding fermented black beans and chili peppers is very common in Hunan cuisine. If Sichuan peppercorns are not added, this recipe is very similar to Hunan cuisine. Considering that Huguang is filling Sichuan, this is very likely.
What an enjoyable journey. And very good insights. Will be fun to taste Mapo Tofu in 50 years.
I love these deep dives. Thanks for the video.
I love your new food history lessons.
This was a fascinating watch. Can't wait to check out Chen Mapo this summer when I visit Chengdu :)
I know you're a cooking channel, any chance we could get a video on Baijiu 白酒?
Awesome video, once again!
What got me into Chinese cooking was the anime Cooking Master Boy (1997) and the recipe of the first episodes: mapo tofu. I was especially confused since I saw the mapo tofu as we know it from the 1956 recipe, while the traditional family recipe was closer to the first recipe of the video: pork pieces, very clear sauce from the lack of dobanjiang, and a single chili.
It is now that I realize that the anime was most likely anachronistic, but I pretty much cook mapo tofu twice a month as a result of that.
I literally made mapo tofu using your recipe yesterday and then this pops up!
Back in college I worked at a Chinese restaurant. The couple that owned it had gone through the "great leap forward". They had both been college students that were sent out to the rural countryside to be farmers.
We had some wild conversations- their stories were even crazier than I'd read in western recordings of Mao's works.
They also made some of the best Mapo Dofu I've ever had. Good times with VERY good people. They treated the whole staff like family.
Also, it's sort of weird that the recipe calls for beef. Both of the owners of the restaurant I worked at, as well as a contemporary friend who grew up in the mid-north of mainland China back in the 80s never had beef (at least that they could remember).
It was always lamb/chicken/pork or fish if they lived near a river/lake.
"oh, a video talking about that delicious but explosive dish I haven't tried more than once. sure, let's watch it."
Lol try it again if you can handle it; it’s so delicious and umami-packed, and the textures are sublime!
I suppose I should be surprised that the more modern recipe that I have been using has a lot more ingredients, as this dish did originate as a simple working class meal. That said, I was shocked that the older recipes had fermented black beans and no pixian doubanjiang. That seems to potentially really make this a different dish. I'll have to give a try and see how different it is; perhaps I'll have two recipes I can use depending on my mood! I will say that my understanding of the way the beef is used, i.e., cooked until crunchy, makes it more a texture element and I have made a vegetarian version with chopped and then fried wood ear mushroom instead of beef. Great video and safe travels!
The priest smiles, for he saw Mapo Tofu
Fate jokes aside, I love this!
I like the pacing in all you guy's videos.
Awesome episode!
Excellent video 🎉 感谢!
Hey guys (and other culinarily inclined viewers!)
I have the unenviable misfortune of having an allergy to soy protein; that means no tofu, soy beans, miso. Two weird exceptions are soy sauce and the Korean fermented soy paste (not really sure how that works...)
I've always wanted to follow along with the recipes on this channel, but my allergies present a pretty serious obstacle. Is there anything I can use to substitute tofu? What about the fermented soy beans?
Thanks so much, love this channel.
In this one case, I'd hazard a guess subbing out the tofu for a white fish might be pretty nice, or maybe sometime like the pomelo rind preparation they covered on the channel several years ago? There's also the chicken "tofu" recipe they covered in 2018.
Have you previously tried the Chinese fermented soy beans? I'm wondering if there's something in the fermentation process of the Korean paste and the soy sauce that's denaturing the protein you're allergic to. Could this Korean paste be used in this dish (I'm unfamiliar with its flavor profile)?
Hmm... unfortunately we haven't covered peanut tofu yet (which was the first thing I thought of), but there's lots of 'tofus' in China :) While it probably wouldn't work directly here, rice tofu is a very nice product: th-cam.com/video/ssxwWvjUgKw/w-d-xo.html
And of course, Cantonese 'fish tofu puffs' are one of my favorite things, period: th-cam.com/video/HrDMF8Co0d4/w-d-xo.html
so these are a few thoughts as a non-expert, late at night and off the top of my head, so take them with a hefty pinch of salt but:
iirc, pixian doubanjiang is traditionally made with broad beans, not soy beans, so you might be ok with a more modern mapo recipe which uses that as the foundational flavour (idk what the reality of mass-produced doubanjiang is wrt to soy so you'd have to check the ingredients for individual brands)
as for the tofu, maybe try experimenting with some of the starch-based jellies and "tofus" that come from the south-west of China and neighbouring regions. Chris and Steph did a video for a rice-based one from Guizhou a while back, and mung bean starch jelly is pretty widespread. I don't know how well they'd stand up to simmering in the sauce, but it feels like they could provide a similar soft/smooth/slippery/comparatively-bland contrast to the strongly flavoured sauce
ayyy, fellow soy allergy survivor! hello!
(soy sauce and fermented soy paste makes me suffer though, you're lucky on that part. the fermentation probably has something to do with it bcs fish gives me trouble but fish sauce doesn't. something something the protein gets denatured or something)
i've found that steamed egg has a very similar texture to silken tofu, and it having very mild taste by itself should also mimic how tofu generally works. mix egg and water in a bowl, strain if you want it to be as smooth as possible, then cover with cling wrap and steam. most recommend to eat it with soy sauce, sesame oil, and chopped green onions, but it should also be good as tofu replacement in mapo tofu.
This will take a lot of work and medical intervention. It depends on how severe your allergies are, - talking as a registered nurse here. If the allergy affects your airways definitely avoid them. However if your allergies are like skin symptoms you can definitely not go wrong with prophylactic anti histamine meds before eating.
But for a long term approach we actually advice parents of allergic kids to a desensitization regimen. like introducing the allergen little by little over a large period of time. until the allergic reactions become more manageable
Fascinating enough, the original is exactly how my mom has always made it. Chili oil, garlic, tofu, pork, and scallions. Perhaps that's the version that made it to where she grew up.
So from where I read elsewhere: (dont quote this from me) that the inland Province of Sichuan lacked table salt and thus had to import salt from other places of China. There were a lot of oxen and cows being used as beast of burdens to transport carts of salt in and out of Sichuan in the old days. The lower class labourers sometimes could get their hands on beef of the oxen that died to fatigue in the transportation business.
That's interesting! The use of beef in this dish has always thrown me. My mom is from Taiwan and beef is a relatively recent addition to their diet. Cattle were draft animals, not meat animals. Pork was much more common.
Look at Pasta Grammar about recipe shift on Bolognese sauce and how it has shifted. Chinese culture/coking is not the only one affected by regional😊 variations and ingredient availability “drift”.Language “drift” also occurs. Southern English is much closer to the dialect used in the southern USA & Appalachia, (for instance)
Absolutely love you guys.
the '58 reminds me of the mapo at Chiko in Greenpoint (Brooklyn), one of the beefiest things I've ever eaten. if you'll be in NYC at all and get a chance, definitely recommend it!
I know I can't taste through a screen and all but I can tell ya right now I'm gonna miss that spicy bean paste.
This was great - thank you!
I feel vindicated by this video for adding beef/tofu closer (but not quite) 1 to 2 proportion. Though I don't know if I can make myself not to add pixian... it's my favourite part of the process.
Next step: Mapork 😈
I'll be making a vegan version of the 58 recipe soon, will take your word for it being good, I'll have fun recreating some flavours here
Thanks a lot. I will definitely try the 50s version. Had Mapo Dofu in Chengdu and it is one of my favourite dishes but I did it wrong using Doubanjiang (at least I did the beef part right). Tomorrow I will go and purchase fermented black beans. Over the time people go and bring their personal touch into recipes. Look what they have done to the humble Carbonara but at least true Italians are culinary traditionalists, easy to tell right from wrong.
Not gonna lie, the '58 recipe looks amazing as you say, but the 19th century recipe looks like something I'd want to play around with. That sliced pork looks so good in there.
So what I did with it was marinate it with our 'standard marinade', and then cooked it over a low flame because I was deathly afraid that the chili powder would burn. I think perhaps using a product like duojiao or LGM's 'pickled chili' might be a reasonable direction to go with, actually?
I also went very herb heavy with it, using similar ratios as the 'Horse Station Pot' that Dawei shared a few years back :)
I wish Mapork was a thing. I find tofu pretty much to just be solid disappointment, but the sauce is really tasty.
The Japanese take on Chinese food is also absolutely fascinating. I tend to make "Japanized" mapo tofu for my family since it's less spicy and easier for my kids to handle. The flavors are more rounded and less bold. Still a very nice textural contrast between the ground meat and the soft tofu.
A lid made with sticks woven together with some cotton string made specifically to use on the wok is a godsend (and also is easy to make)
I think people who know how to cook judge other people's cooking online by how many shortcuts they take, like, if i see mexican-americans making some dish using canned stuff i would squint a bit more than if they dont simmer enough a sauce made from scratch; with chinese cuisine i had a more open mind regarding apparently counterintutive or "odd" stuff because i understand that their aim (as in expected flavor/seasoning/ is diferent than ours and would be more willing to try a, say, 5 year old fermented bread sauce than those casserole looking enchiladas made with canned sauce.
In the US my preference for meat is to buy the "assorted" pork cuts, thin cut. They usually end up on sale, I just roughly cut the meat off the bones, save the bones for stock, and use the meat however you like. Thin sliced does wonders for the texture compared to the thicker cuts that americans are used to.
I'm from Kunming and I find you know more about Chinese food in general than many Chinese.
I made mabo dofu for a date once, who commented that it wasn’t “authentic” mabo dofu because I used pork instead of beef and it wasn’t spicy. It was my Japanese grandmother’s recipe for mabo dofu, which she never made with beef because we didn’t eat beef. My date wasn’t even Chinese!
That is so annoying. “authenticity” is so misleading
@ yeah, especially since I never claimed I was making some sort of genuine, traditional recipe. I simply said it was one of my favorite dishes that I wanted her to try.
Amazing video
Wow! This seems so similar to the version I make and learned from Fuchsia Dunlop’s Land of Plenty, of course with the exception that I believe it’s minced pork, and also doubanjiang is included. But otherwise, I feel like I can already taste how delicious this is in my mind. I am DEFINITELY going to make this version when I can get my hands on some stock ingredients.
Imagine a collab with @TastingHistory
This was awesome but I do have one question- how did doubanjiang go from being not part of the standard recipe for over 100 years to being considered necessary?
That, I think, is an interesting riddle! All we have is Chefu saying that it was added in the mid 20th century. As to when exactly and why, that's either lost to history or there for a historian to uncover...
@@ChineseCookingDemystifiedI wonder if it has anything to do with compensating for less flavourful beef as meat production was industrialised?
@@IAmTheUltimateRuler Or perhaps it has something to do with the increased availability of Pixian douban? In the past it was very much a Pixian special, before it was industrialized
Always hard to guess these sorts of things.
Super cool video, really interesting and amazing research as always! Could you expand a bit on why the '58 version gets worse as it sits? (in the spirit of "it's bad for specific reasons")
With more standard Mapo Tofu, I have often found it's really good the next day - maybe not better but different? The tofu soaks through, so a bit more homogenised, but definitely tasty!
around 8:00 you hold a jar of what are seemingly bay leaves, but I can't hear you mentioning adding any to the stock.
I just made a big batch of Mapo Tofu the other night; I was craving it like a fiend... So nice on a cold winter morning! Is it considered a "winter dish" in China?
Thanks for another informative video! I always wonder about the use of beef in mapo tofu. My Taiwanese mom always adapted her cooking to available ingredients in US so any kind of dish that called for ground pork, usually ended up with ground beef. My understanding is that beef wasn't really eaten much in Taiwan as well as in the broader Chinese culture as cattle were working animals needed to pull the plow on the farm. Pigs were raised for food so pork was the most common meat. Even now some elderly Taiwanese folks avoid eating beef out of respect for the labor of oxen. So I'm extremely curious how a working class dish from Sichuan ended up having beef in it!
My biggest gripe with Americanized Chinese food in the States is mapo tofu doesn't have any meat in it. I've never seen it and it always tastes sweet like they intentionally add too much sugar to it. It drives me insane
I was surprised with the price for oxtails!! Here in Brazil it still is one of the cheapest cuts of beef, it's even cheaper than most other bone-in cuts like beef ribs and transversally-cut shanks.
Would love to see a longer video on Fanpu-style eateries
Please can you you make a video about your kitchen design. Is a steel backsplash common in Chinese kitchens? Do you prefer to cook under the range hood inside or cooking out in the balcony? Is a dishwasher common? Do you have a freezer unit for storing meat?
I must have missed the episode of you explaining the reason/purpose behind soaking the tofu in hot salted water. Anyone knows why?
It gets rid of the grassy taste of tofu.